‘Finding a New Aesthetic:
Shakespearean Performance in the UK in the 21st Century.’
Project Report.
Matthew Bent
The project can be seen as divided in to three clear objectives: to determine whether
or not David Mamet/William H Macy’s ‘Practical Aesthetics’ can be applied
successfully to Shakespearean text; to explore the extent to which placing scenes from
these plays [‘The Winter’s Tale’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Hamlet’] in different performance
scenarios changes their meanings and character dynamics; and, using the textual
analysis from the pragmatic approach already employed as a grounding, investigate
how the techniques of various influential contemporary artists/theatre-makers can be
used to clarify and make more accessible the meanings and character intentions of
the often dense verse form.
Reflecting on the beginnings of this project now it seems incredibly broad. To
encompass an investigation of the effectiveness of a ‘Practical Aesthetics’ approach to
Shakespeare, across three plays, whilst also experimenting through the ideas of
several performance practitioners was a huge remit for a 6 week project. So, over the
course of those weeks the workshops gradually refined themselves to a more concise
set of objectives, just as we gradually discovered exactly what forms of
experimentation we were interested in. As we [myself, the six performers, Dramaturg,
Movement Director and Producer who formed the workshop ‘company’] developed
our working method we cut away the focus on ‘Practical Aesthetics’, we abandoned
The Winter’s Tale, and left behind any desire to find ‘real-life’ contexts for the plays,
in favour of simply playing with the text - in terms of the musicality of the language,
it’s reaction to pre-determined movement scores, and its imagery.
What we had found, at the end of our Hamlet sessions, was the beginnings of a new
working methodology in which a variety of different sources - whether it be a
gesture/movement sequence, a make-up design, or a ‘found’ object - could provide
stimulus for a scene on an equal level to the written text. This way of working was
greatly influenced by my discovery of theatre artist Robert Wilson and subsequent
immersion in his work. Seeing his Einstein on the Beach live as a part of my research
challenged many of my previously held ideas about how theatre should/could look
and feel, and inspired me to see my work on this project in a different way. From this
point on the work became much more about bringing multiple ‘texts’ to rehearsal, and
seeing how they could ‘speak to’ our initial, written, text.
The multiple points of departure for experimenting with scenes developed in to ideas
of the de-centring of the spoken word as the prime carrier of meaning in a dramatic
scene, where the action defined by Shakespeare is still (for the most part) adhered to.
Then, pushing the boundaries of experimentation even further, we played with
removing any sense of dramatic action or character from the scene altogether and
playing the text for its aesthetic properties as part of a postdramatic1 scene. This was
now a far-cry from the initial Mamet/Macy approach to text. In later workshops we
experimented with dropping character intentions completely and just played with
1
This is the dramatic-postdramatic antithesis as defined by Lehmann in Postdramatic Theatre
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)
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Shakespeare’s language for its musicality, its sounds and its cadences, alongside our
other, non-verbal, texts.
From the Hamlet sessions two workshops stand out as having been particularly
successful in finding new perspectives on the text. In the workshop on act one, scene
two of the play, I wanted to bring a pre-determined set of movements and images to
the rehearsal and see how they ‘spoke to’ the text. In appendix A I have given three
still shots showing the progression of images through the scene. In the first image we
can see the ‘building’ of the scene. The performers walked very slowly (the performer
playing Hamlet (far left) counting internally to eight with each footstep, the
performers playing Claudius and Gertrude to 16 with each footstep) towards their
positions in the second image, where they delivered the lines of the scene (omitting
Hamlet’s), before stepping down and exiting, again on a count of 16 for each step.
Hamlet’s lines during the main body of the scene were replaced by a repetitive series
of movements designed to tire the performer out. By the time the performers playing
Claudius and Gertrude had left, the performer playing Hamlet was visibly physically
drained as she delivered the ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’ speech.
The slow movement was brought to the scene with no particular ideas in mind for
how it would work with or against the text. However, the feeling Claudius/Gertude’s
very slow entrance gave, continued long after Hamlet had reached her assigned
position and begun her series of actions, was of a great display of power. This fed
directly in to Claudius’ speech: his first flexing of his political muscles as King.
The Hamlet session on act one, scene three initially followed a similar pattern bringing ideas for images to the scene and seeing how it played out with these in
mind. This scene, between Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia, is a very static one though
and finding anything interesting to bring visually to a scene so bogged down by long
speeches was proving difficult. At this point we decided to remove almost all of the
text from the scene and experiment with different ways of communicating. The
performer playing Laertes was the only one allowed to communicate through
language - he selected a few lines at random from the long speech the character gives
to Ophelia and was told to deliver them for the sounds of the language, playing with
different inflections and intonations, but never speaking with a specific ‘intention’ in
mind (in the sense of saying a line to get a particular reaction from a particular
character, etc.). The performer playing Ophelia was given a very restrictive set of
physical actions - sitting down, she could only move her arms/legs in certain
directions, and was told to select a few lines from the scene and try to communicate
their meaning through random vocal sounds instead of language (see appendix B).
The performer playing Polonius, finally, was not allowed to make any sound, but
instead was given the task of moving up and down a straight line in a clumsy, fastpaced walk. When the performer chose to he could stop, and had to spell out the line
‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ with his hand in the air.
The effect of this presentation of the text is of a collage - showing a variety of
different ways of communicating which suggest no single obvious interpretation. The
important word here is presentation. Instead of offering up an interpretation of
Shakespeare’s words and representation of his characters as grounded in a real life
situation, I took influence from Wilson here in a desire to ‘keep meanings open’, to
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allow ‘numerous interpretive possibilities’2. The removal of character intentions and
directly interactive relationships, as well as throwing out almost all of the text, created
a non-dramatic scene in which the text and characters, as well as their relationship
with the way the performers were moving, were presented without anchorage towards
a certain meaning, and thus were entirely open to interpretation.
Throughout the workshop process a language developed amongst the performers and
myself relating to our work. In the movement exercises, as we experimented with
structured, ‘non-naturalistic’ performance styles, it was important for myself and the
performers to be able to communicate effectively with each other. Thus a
‘vocabulary’ of set movements developed. Many of the sessions involved me writing
this vocabulary up on a whiteboard, before we ran through a series of familiar
exercises in which the performers could experiment with different ways of moving.
The system we developed was made up of walks, gestures and ‘punctuations’ (joints
that linked the different walks/gestures) as a structure for improvisation as well as for
helping to determine the physical action of a given scene. The use of this structure
brought a discipline to the way in which the performers moved, whilst also allowing
them adequate room to bring something of themselves to the set movements,
embellishing them with their own personal touches.
Having the time to allow this method to develop was essential, as was not having a
deadline in the form of a public performance. As there was no real ‘conclusion’ to the
work we’d done, I feel as though this approach of experimentation through bringing a
structured and disciplined performance style to the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, as
well as pushing an overall equality of performance texts could make further
discoveries in a similar, laboratory-style setting. However, with this philosophy of
equality in all performance texts inevitably comes the necessity to try out these ideas
in a public performance context, where aspects like stage lighting, costumes and
music come in to the picture and must be fully integrated in to the performance
design. Only when this has been achieved: when the work we have started with
performers can be incorporated in to a cohesive whole based on the equality of
performance texts, can we determine whether or not we have found something new
for the staging of Shakespeare’s plays.
Bibliography
Brecht, S., The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (London: Methuen Drama, 1994)
Brook, P., The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 2008)
Holmberg, A., The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005)
Lavender, A., Hamlet in Pieces (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001)
Lehmann, H-T., Postdramatic Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)
Quadri, F., et. al., Robert Wilson (New York: Rizzoli, 1998)
Safir, M. A., (ed.), Robert Wilson from Within (Paris: The Arts Arena, 2011)
Shevtsova, M., Robert Wilson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007)
Appendices
2
Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) p. 70
3
A)
4
B)
5